


After Hours

by Doceo_Percepto



Category: Bendy and the Ink Machine
Genre: Bendy has a dick now also, Bendy is his little cartoon self, Bendy is honestly awful, Bendy just does what he wants, Breaking the Fourth Wall, Dissociation, Forced Orgasm, Henry is a good dude, Henry is thoroughly traumatized, Henry's declining mental health, Mind Control, Mind Control Ink, Mind Reading, Non-Consensual Blow Jobs, Other, Raped to Death, and they all lived happily ever after, as a weapon, because why not, bendy has a vagina, but he's really creepy, flooding someone's body with ink?, in a very bad situation, now with art!, oh wait nvm, or whatever he wants but it's a vagina here, really nothing here is consensual, the fuck is going on anymore, this is super porny
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-15
Updated: 2019-04-01
Packaged: 2019-08-02 05:21:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 7
Words: 17,817
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16298882
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Doceo_Percepto/pseuds/Doceo_Percepto
Summary: You are Henry, and you regret ever creating the little devil darling.





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Art courtesy of [toybooxxx](https://toybooxxx.tumblr.com). Many thanks!

The sodium yellow light of the studio is heavy on your eyes, thickening in your skull like sticky plaques, while the chemical stench of ink – ink everywhere, in the walls, dripping from the ceiling, flooding the floors – makes you dizzy and nauseous. It’s hard to think straight. You feel only half alive, half yourself, ill and scared and muffled like an animal suffocating in honey-soaked cotton.

The only mercy is that you are not one of _them_ , not yet. You’ve seen them, seen what Bendy has done to them: the slunching, ink-infested husks of people. They are beyond reason. You, at least, are allowed your mind, however mired and sluggish it is now, crippled under the oppressive weight of the studio and the monster controlling it.

You know it’s not out of kindness. Kindness is something he’s not capable of. He lets you keep your sense of self because he likes to watch you suffer. Your feeble attempts to gather a resistance, to seek ways to destroy him – he finds it very, very amusing. And sometimes, he gives you reminders of just how powerless you are, how your every action is something he _allows_ , and that he could choose, at any moment, to take away that freedom.

This is, you suspect, the newest horrible reminder.

He’s splayed out on his back on top of your desk, his tail coyly curling and uncurling. You suppose it’s meant to be ironic. Him laid out where you’ve dedicated hours, days, weeks, months, to drawing him over and over and over again. His expression is disgustingly lascivious, something you never would have drawn on him. The irony only sickens you.

If it were up to you, you would run. You would flee back to the safe house. You'd get as far away from this demon as you could.

But it isn’t up to you.

You may not be one of those husks, but you are not wholly human, either. Not anymore. Bendy had slit your wrists once; into the wounds slithered thin black ink, which has ever since pumped through your veins. You suspect you'd have to die to remove it, and while you have (in your darkest moments) considered just that, you have not yet gathered the courage to do it.

So here you are. The ink in your veins enables him to control you. You feel that control in every tense line of your body as he holds you frozen. You can’t even move your head, or close your eyes. He wants you to watch, and so you have to.

“Ya don’t have to be so whiny about it, creator,” he laughs, and trails thick fingers down his body, which is very much a _cartoon_ , despite him being some nightmarish demon. “What's wrong? Don’t like what ya see?”

Your jaw unclenches; you’re allowed to speak. “Let me go,” you bite out.

“Aww, c’mon Henry, you make a guy feel all unwanted.”

“I know what you’re trying to prove,” you say with a measured tone that does not match your terror. Showing fear will not help you. He likes fear. “And you don’t need to prove it, Bendy. I already know. You have complete control here.”

“Why don’t ya call me _my Lord_ , like Sammy does?”

You grit your teeth together. You aren’t going to. You don’t want – but then, against your intention, the words are forced out, “I’m sorry, my Lord.” You hate your traitorous tongue and teeth.

He laughs; it’s sharp and high-pitched. It’s crueler than any laugh in the show. “That’s more like it. Boy, you’re screamin’ somethin’ awful in your head. Don’t tell me ya really find me that repulsive?”

“Please let me go,” you say again, hoarsely.

“Nah.” He spreads his legs and arches his back in a lewd display that has bile rising up your throat. “Ya aren’t here just to watch, Henry. Whatcha so shy for?”

No. Your mind throws itself against his control, clawing at the bars of his will. You don't want to play his sick games.

“Oooh, you’re really fighting this. Even harder than that time I was pluckin’ your fingernails out. Ain’t that wild?”

“I don’t want this, you demon!”

“I think ya do.”

God, no. The revolting yellow glow of the studio thickens (or perhaps you just think it does), your vision fogs, and something in your skull wrenches hard enough for a pitiful cry to emerge from your lips. He’s in your head, and he’s toying around, clumsy and dangerous but very determined. Then he strikes what he was looking for, and your nerves are scraped raw. The pain is blinding - you would have hunched over if not for him keeping you firmly upright.

It’s only when the first whitehot surge of pain dwindles that you realize his objective was not pain at all. It was pleasure. Forced pleasure. 

Bendy’s hand thuds on the desk as he points and laughs. “Oh wow, your face! You look hilarious, like I just killed a puppy!”

Your breath is coming in short, fast stutters as you quietly panic. There’s a heady ache heavy between your legs, and a tension low in your spine. It doesn’t matter how you feel, or what you want. He’s tugging the strings in your head, making your body react as if you desire this. You had no idea he had that ability, but now that you know, you’re mortified, and wish you'd never learned.

“You can thank me later,” Bendy chortles, reclining back against the desk again like a lazy king. “You were all saaad and limp. Now you’re not. C’mon, Henry, why don’t ya show me watcha got?”

 _No_! Muscles stupidly twitch out of your desperation to cover yourself, but instead of doing that, your hands begin to undo the buttons of your pants. Your tongue is released, and words spill, “stop, stop, Bendy, please, let me go!”

Your mutinous fingers tug your fly open, and free your cock from your clothes. It juts out, flushed and twitching, from a hint of tangled hair.

Your face heats in abject humiliation. You want to die.

“It ain’t bad I guess,” Bendy remarks. “Could be bigger.”

“Stop this,” you beg, “please, my – my Lord-“ you choke on the words, despising yourself even as you speak them, but you would do anything to prevent him from doing this.

“Anything?” Bendy laughs. He can read your thoughts as if you speak them out loud. “Henry-o, that means nothin'. I can _make_ you do anything. I can make ya want me.”

“I don’t want this!” it’s a half-scream, wrought with desperation. “You’re forcing me to react this way but this isn’t _want_!”

“I know,” Bendy says. “That’s why it’s fun.” And then the heat is scrawling up your spine, intensifying against your own will, and you can’t help the noise that burps from your throat: something between a whimper and a moan. Your need is throbbing. You’re agonizingly hard, and pleasure twines up your chest whether you want it or not.

“Your face kinda looks like a tomato.” Bendy’s tail coils around his leg, and his smile is coquettish. “Really strugglin’ with some conflicting desires, aren’t ya?”

You regret ever drawing him. Regret ever coming to work here. Regret every action you've taken from the day you started to now. This is a hideous perversion of the simple joy that cartoons once held for you, a corruption of something that is supposed to be harmless and entertaining. You can only loathe what you’ve created, but despite this, your body steps forward. "I hate you," you spit out, while your hands frame either side of his head, and your swollen dick is a mere inch from him.

He grins up at you. “Can’t just dive right into things, Henry. And here I thought you were a gentleman.”

You seethe through your teeth. You try again and again to jerk your hands away, to wrest back some control, but you are betrayed by your own limbs. Your fingers caress lightly over Bendy’s horns, trail down the edges of his face, all while he wears a smug self-satisfied expression. He doesn’t feel like a living thing. When you touch him, you feel an abyss, a monster, a demon entirely lacking empathy or mercy.

“Well aren’t you full’a compliments today?” Bendy purrs.

You’re howling in your skull, but he’s taken away your ability to speak. As if pulled by strings, your fingers drift to his shoulders, and stroke down further, further, _further_.

“Wow, you move fast.” His tail slips between his legs, and his voice is some simpering attempt at demure, “I don’t know if I’m ready, creator.”

His eyes are as black as a void.

You've never felt so disgusting as you do now, but your body continues to move against your will. Your hands close around his thin, unreal wrists, pinning him roughly to the desk as if you had any power at all over him.

He squirms whorishly before remembering to play-act, and then you hate how sickly sweet his voice is, "No, Henry. Don't hurt me. You're scarin' me." You close both his wrists in one hand. Your other hand grabs his lithe tail and yanks it to the side. This isn't you. None of this is you.

Any badly acted illusion is gone as Bendy gleefully licks a black snake-like tongue over his teeth. "Don't lie to yourself. I know ya want it."

As if in agreement, a powerful shot of pleasure nearly cripples you. Your untouched cock throbs, flushed and thick to the point of pain. With what limited power you have, you screw your eyes shut and fight back tears. You’re helpless. You can do nothing to fight him or stop him. His hooks are deep, deep in your skull and you are pitifully, defenselessly mortal.

“Well, no need t’ deny yourself. It’s clear what ya need. I mean-“ he tries for coy again, but there’s no disguising his sadistic thrill, “you’ve got me all held down, Henry. Couldn’t say no even if I wanted to.”

As if mechanically controlled, your hand yanks his tail, and you nudge your hips forward. The sensitive tip of your cock prods between his legs, and he’s cold. Cold like death. He allows the shudder that goes down your spine, but nothing else. The temperature does nothing to assuage the heat that he has coursing through you. Your hips cant forward, and his skin - his _ink_ \- caves to allow the penetration. You sink into him, like being pulled into an abyss.

It isn’t pleasurable. Nothing about it is intrinsically pleasurable; it’s terrifying and _wrong_. But he draws a moan from your throat like a fish dragged out by a hook, and the scorching need in your body only intensifies. You feel torn apart. Hateful and aroused. Horrified and needy. This is something you would never have done on your own volition. Even with Linda, with someone who loves you and who you love - you had not done this with her. You were both going to wait until marriage.

This is yet another thing the demon is stealing from you, and you want to tear your own skin off from the fury and injustice of it. 

He doesn’t let you move. You’re buried up in him, shaking and sweating with need, but you can’t keep going and can’t back away. Your knuckles are white over his wrists. Your breath rattles hollowly between you and him.

"Have somethin' to say?" he coos.

"I will kill you," you manage to hiss, "I will find a way. No matter what I have to-"

"Enough'a that." And your lips are sewn shut. Your hips finally begin to move; the noises are slick, wet, and hideous. If that's not awful enough, he's talking again: "Say - Linda, is that the name I lifted from your noggin? Wonder what she'd think of ya now, Henry."

You pray to any God above that Linda never,  _ever_ finds out. You pray with a bone-deep despair that she never steps foot inside the studio. That she forgets all about you, meets some nice good man, and has everything that you are no longer privileged enough to get.

"I'm the only God here," Bendy says with relish. 

Rebellion surges in your chest. He won't let you speak, but the thought screams with fury,  _You're only a god in the studio._ He has no power outside of it, and you will believe all you like that there are other deities ruling there, ones merciful and benevolent. 

His expression sours with disapproval. Vicious, hot pleasure licks into your mind and you hunch double with the intensity of it. Your fist loops his tail once around, and then you yank him hard onto your cock. Your hips jerk with harsh, jolting movements. You wish you could feel some satisfaction in the savagery of it, but his gaze relaxes into lazy amusement the longer you thrust into him. He doesn't feel pain from what you're doing. You don't even think he feels any physical pleasure. But he knows it torments you, and he knows he holds all the cards, and with clenching despair you know he's winning. 

"Maybe  _Linda_ will come into the studio," Bendy says over the nauseating sounds. "Maybe I'll worm my way into her little mind, too. Maybe I'll play with her like I am you. Bet she's not as nice a lay as I am. She'd never getcha this revved up, huh, Henry?"

You hate him. You hate him more than you've ever hated anything. A growl of a moan rises to your lips. Sweat is slicking your shirt to your back. You hate how good it feels. How good he's _making_ it feel, when it wouldn't without his influence. You need release. Your rhythm falls apart, your thighs repeatedly strike the bottom of the desk, tension is crawling up in your muscles, you're beginning to shake -

Suddenly, you’re free. His hooks are out of your mind, and your body is yours again.

Gasping, you wrench away from him, repulsed by his mere touch. Your hand leaps to your dick and with two short jerks, you're spurting seed over the floor. 

Then there's silence, apart from your heaving breath, and the diminutive tears. Part of you is numb in disbelief. All the pleasure is gone, leaving just hollow, empty horror.

But Bendy can't leave you alone. He sits up, rests his chin on his hands. "Dangit. I was hopin' you'd be sex-crazed enough to just keep goin'. Had to be boring, Henry-o. Guess next time I'll just have ta keep control of ya a second longer."

Your softening dick is dripping with ink and you feel sullied, wrong, used. You can’t yank up your pants fast enough, and it’s to the chorus of his laughter.

When your tremulous tear-filled gaze meets his, his expression is sinister and delighted. Whatever slit he’d had to accommodate you is gone, and it’s exceedingly clear that he, unlike you, has come out of this experience not remotely changed, apart from the additional amusement at your expense. 

"Oooh, so angry," he crosses his legs and winks at you. "Want a round two already? Maybe this time you'll finish in me, eh?"

You’re gone before he can spend another second on the thought, your feet thundering over the boards of the old studio.

You fear the next time he decides to make a plaything of you.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wasn't going to continue this and then I couldn't help myself.

This is not a world meant for real people. This is a world where you can only suffer, trapped away from the sun in hallways narrow, dark, and endless. There is no morning and no night. No sleep, even, as Bendy has somehow robbed both the need and the ability from you. Existence is one ceaseless nightmare, nauseatingly suffused by bile yellow light and the thick reek of ink that you never truly accustom to.

You are always exhausted. Always suppressed beneath a heavy, placeless confusion that makes you feel perpetually lost. Focus is something that slips away no matter how hard you try to grasp it.

Destroy Bendy, you often think. You must destroy him; you must escape. That is a constant underlying current, screaming at you. Destroy Bendy. But you often snap awake in the middle of tasks you don’t remember beginning. You enter hallways and forget where they go or why you entered them. You prepare plans only to read them over with no recognition or understanding of what they were supposed to mean. Destroy Bendy, but you are hardly coherent enough to begin to conjure an idea _how_.

Bendy finds it all very amusing. He is always watching. Always pulling the strings. The hallways change and meld and warble and distort; time jumps and skips and plays back from the start again. You feel like a little character, running back and forth over a labyrinthine stage, never able to reach out and stop the show. You suppose it’s ironic, and Bendy loves ironic things.

He loves _you_ , too, in whatever meaning that word has in such a nightmarish place. Whatever meaning that word has to a demon. All you know is that he pays especial attention to you above any of the other souls trapped here. That he likes to pay you visits, seizing control of your body and making use of you much in the way he had at your own desk. Only Sammy spends more time with him, and Sammy… there is something very wrong with Sammy. Sometimes he watches on Bendy’s command. It never fails to sicken you, the jealousy and worship in the former Music Director’s voice as he watches you be manipulated to commit atrocities you’d never otherwise perform. Sammy is beyond help.

You think you are, too, in a way wholly different. Again and again Bendy tracks you down and proves just how helpless you are, how futile your efforts. No matter how deep in the studio you flee, he is always there to follow. Or always there waiting.

You are the verge of absolute despair when you finally find hope. Hope is a strange, distant concept that had begun to feel impossible, but it is reignited. Hope. It returns in the form of two people that feel familiar, like wading through a half-forgotten dream. One responds to Tom. The other… she doesn’t remember her name, and it’s clear she’s meant to be _Alice_ but a nugget of thought sticks in your brain and you always think _Allison_.

They find you at your lowest, and take you into new depths of the studio. To a place where Bendy’s presence feels less oppressive, to areas he perhaps treads _less_. It’s their own little sanctuary, carved out of a realm otherwise hostile and unlivable. It’s… heart warming.

You see what they have created, and it may be paltry by some perspectives, but to you there is nothing more comforting, nothing more reassuring. They have a small kitchen, though neither needs to eat, and cots, and they write on the walls for comfort. They have supplies gathered from across the studio, and little decorations and paraphernalia where they can manage it – nothing with Bendy’s face on it, you’re grateful to learn. They have created a home.

At first they don’t trust you, but in time they realize you are just as much a victim as them. Generously, they give you a small section of one room, with a cot that you will never sleep on, but that doesn’t matter. It is yours, and it is…

You hesitate to say safe. Safe is not something that exists here. But it’s yours.

“The demon doesn’t come down here,” Allison tells you. “I’m not sure he even knows we’re here.”

You doubt it. He knows everything. But time passes, and he does not come. He does not disturb this modest sanctuary. You allow more hope, a fragile but budding thing.

They talk about destroying Bendy, too. In low, nervous tones. But they think, if he is destroyed, then there might be an escape from this place. That it’s Bendy trapping everyone inside, and his destruction could lead to freedom.

Freedom is a strange concept. In all your thoughts, you had only imagined an end to the torment the demon brings you, but… at some point, you had stopped thinking about escape. You had stopped believing it was possible.

With them… you start believing again. It’s frightening, on some level. So long you have been trapped here that you don’t remember the outside world. You don’t remember what it is to exist without pain and terror. And sometimes, the concept of living without those things, and without Bendy’s presence, is so frightening you think perhaps you don’t want to leave at all.

Once you confess this to Allison, feeling monstrous and wrong, and she quietly admits the same.

“But this existence is what's wrong,” she says. “We have to keep fighting, Henry.”

That gives you confidence. Keep fighting. Keep trying. The end result may be frightening, but you know it’s right. You know you are not meant to be trapped here, and neither are any of the lost souls that piteously wander the halls, begging to be freed, crying, rocking, moaning. For them and for yourself, you must find an escape.

Tom pours over blueprints like a religion. He can’t speak, but he seems convinced there is something in them, some key to bringing down Bendy. They are blueprints of the Ink Machine, and even looking at its designs on paper make you cold inside. You’re inclined to believe him, that the Ink Machine’s destruction may be linked to Bendy’s.

“He has a lot of ideas,” Allison tells you, “A lot of knowledge about the Machine… he’s onto something, I know it.”

Allison sometimes ventures out into the studio to collect more blueprints where she can find them, and new tools and supplies that may come in handy.

Tom gets further absorbed in researching. There’s a plan in the works, you gather, one to dismantle the machine at its source.

“It may not kill him, but we think it'll lessen his control over the studio,” Allison explains, and you believe it. You know that the monster is linked to the machine. It makes your heart race to think, after all this time, progress is being made.

You join Allison sometimes in gathering parts, and Tom, through his own mute way, attempts to show you his plans for taking apart the machine. Sometimes, however, the two of them go off into the bowels of the studio on their own, and in those instances it’s up to you to look after the sanctuary.

On one such occasion, you take up Allison’s habit of painting on the walls. You have seen enough of ink, and certainly smelled enough of it, but there is something… inspiring about the expression of creativity and hope through whatever meager means the studio offers. So you paint. You paint scenes that you can no longer consciously remember, places familiar but forgotten, faces with no names attached, only a dull, throbbing ache of _I knew you once but who are you now?_

You are lost, caught up in the terribleness of half memory, when _**he**_ laughs.

Your paintbrush clatters to the floor. You are torn from half-memory and dragged into a reality crowded with lots of very vivid very clear thoughts of agony, torment, terror.

“Hi Henry,” Bendy says.

You turn.

He’s standing there, in the middle of the sanctuary, arms neatly tucked behind his back in a child’s innocuous pose but you know better.

He shouldn’t be here. He can’t be here. It’s been so long since you had seen him, you thought down here was safe…

“Oh, Henry, there ain’t nowhere safe from me.”

No.

You jerk away, your thigh strikes a table hard and throbs but you barely notice.

“I see ya made some new friends,” Bendy continues nonchalantly. “Tom an’ Allison, right?”

A noise escapes your throat, and it’s a pathetic, weak thing.

“Funny, I really hadn’t even noticed ‘em slinking down here. Keepin’ quiet enough I never paid em any mind.” Bendy wanders nearer. “’Course, not until you helped me find ‘em.”

It takes a second to process what he means. That it’s your fault he’s here. You don’t know how. It can’t be your fault. You never led him here, you never –

“Henry,” he murmurs. “My ink runs in your veins. Wherever ya go, I know. An’ I see things outta your eyes.”

It’s your fault. Your fault your fault your fault. They were hidden, they were fine until you, it’s your fault. “Stay away from them,” you breathe.

“What if I don’t?”

“Please.”

“Oh, what a conundrum!” Bendy throws a hand to his forehead in mock despair, “I want so badly to hurt them, but my dear Henry doesn’t want me to! Whatever shall I do!” Slowly his hand slides down his face, revealing the grin he can’t restrain for long. In a lower voice, he murmurs, “what will ya do to stop me, Henry?”

Your mouth is dry. The word _anything_ hovers at the tip of your tongue but you’re too afraid to speak it. Not that it matters. He will do whatever he likes to you.

“It’s nice yer so practical, Henry. Knowin’ it’s all hopeless.” Then he’s right in front of you, and his hands grip your thighs. He stretches like a cat. His touch roams up over your hips, sneaks under your shirt, splays over your belly. It revolts you. “I was thinkin,’ creator, ya must be real needy… Spendin' all this time away from me... They don't keep ya company in quite the same way, do they?”

“Please get off me,” you whisper with no force behind it. He doesn’t even have to control you for you to freeze. There’s no fighting him. You’ve learned that.

He nuzzles between your legs, and whispers, muffled, “’s gotta be rough, bein’ a guy with all these uncontrollable needs… I know it just ain’t the same using your hand, is it?”

You screw your eyes shut and focus only on breathing. You feel ill. But he’s done this dozens of times. He comes by to use you. That’s how it is. And this is worse and different, because now he’s somewhere he shouldn't be and you may have just gotten your only allies killed, but… this part, this part at least is familiar. Maybe if you cooperate, he will leave them alone. It’s such a delicate pathetic hope.

“It is,” Bendy agrees, and his hands slide lower, begin to knead. You let out a soft grunt. It had been a while, because you can’t touch yourself without thinking of him now, and so you avoid it altogether. You blame that for how quickly you respond to his attention. “But you’re pretty pathetic altogether, Henry-o. Did ya tell yer new friends that you an’ I are, ooh, how do ya say it – _together_?~”

You can’t help a low sob. You should have known better than to hope. You should have known better to believe in safety and freedom.

“Aw, don’t be that way,” he croons.

You’re too tired for hatred. Too weary. This place, which once was heartwarming, now is shrouded with that same heavy yellow light, the same nauseating oppressiveness as the rest of the studio. A headache throbs between your temples. He’s in your head, again. Dusting off the cobwebs and re-learning how to play you.

“Stop,” you weakly grunt.

“Shh. Just lemme do my work, Henry. Lemme help ya.” He strums. Pleasure swells. He tugs. Your hands undo your button and zipper mechanically. Everything at his bidding. None of it within your power.

“See? Looks like ya really are in need of attention.”

He licks, and his tongue is cold and unpleasant. You shudder; your hands grip the table behind you tightly. This is new. You don’t know if it’s worse or not. With him, everything is so vile that there’s no comparing one thing to another. Just an endless cycle of horror, and this is the newest iniquity. One gloved hand scrunches your shirt up, the other clutches your thigh, and then he’s taking you in his mouth.

By the time you snap from your paralysis, Bendy has hijacked your body. You can’t move. You can’t push him off, you can’t scream, you can’t jerk away. He makes you caress over his horns, makes your hips nudge needily, makes the sensation electrify your nerves and god above he makes you feel more alive and clear than you’ve been before, like every fiber of your being is suddenly zapped with raw crippling pleasure.

Your breathing so rapidly becomes ragged, your desperation consuming, and it’s so whitehot, like he’s scrubbed away anything else but the ache for _more more more_

Then he stops, and the growl of frustration from your throat is half him, half you.

He licks his teeth, “Don’t ya worry, Henry, I ain’t gonna neglect ya long. Just mistimed it all a teeeeny bit…. Almost got ya pushed over the edge ahead of schedule!”

Ahead of schedule? Your mudded brain tries to parse out his meaning, but doesn’t manage it until,

“Three… two… mmkay-“ Bendy’s serpentine tongue winds around your length just as the door to the sanctuary opens.

 _No!_ Instinctively you try to move, though you know you can’t.

_No no please!_

Bendy makes sure the noises are especially wet and dirty. You want to die on the spot.

Allison and Tom both halt in the doorway. You wish you could scream that you don’t want this. That this isn’t – that it’s not -

But Bendy has control of your tongue, lips and teeth. So instead, you smile at them. You hear your own voice phrase words you’d never speak, “I told my Lord what you were planning. Did you really think I was on your side?” Your laugh is sinister and _wrong_. Tom clenches his weapon tighter, defensively, but Allison stops him. Your voice continues, rich with a foul admiration, “Everything I did, I did for him. Always for him. He’s all that matters. And soon, he'll kill you both, before you can do anything to the Machine.”

Your hand curls around the back of his head, gently guiding him to take you in deeper. Tom lunges; Allison grabs his arm with a “don’t!” She tries to tug him out of the room, and you silently beg for him to go. If they leave, they might be safe. They might be. A whorish moan escapes your throat; your hips begin to cant. You have never hated yourself so much, and you hate him, too, and you hate the wet noises infiltrating your ears, you hate the sight you must make and the betrayal in their eyes.

They’re never going to trust you again. They’re never going to want to see you again.

That you accept. Now if only they would run. If only they could survive, hating you rightfully, but living.

Your eyes slide shut, both hands grasp his horns, and you’re thrusting into his mouth when you hear the door slam. _Go please live please live_

It doesn’t take you long after that – not because of anything within your power, but Bendy controls everything about you, and he’d already finished with the worst part of the game, so he must see no reason to draw this out. It's a strained, half-hearted climax, and you suppose he got his amusement already, that he's not interested in delivering any additional pleasure at the moment. 

When he steps back, you slump to your knees, panting. "Please don't, Bendy. Please don't hurt them. Don't, don't, d-" He spits on your face. You flinch. It's still warm, and sticky-viscous. "P-please," you choke.

"That was fun," he says cheerily. "Time t' say hi to your new friends now. I'm sure we'll be the best of buds."


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some chapters get better. Some chapters just get weirder.

You have grown to know your captor far better than anyone would ever wish. He torments you above all the other lost souls trapped in this infernal place. He seeks you out in the cramped and endless halls, time after time, to terrify, maim, or traumatize you in new horrible ways. He is tireless. And you… you are tired. So very tired.

There’s a list, now, in your head, of the times you grew so tired that you did not want to exist anymore.

Once, you opened your wrists using the lid of a soup can, which at the time was very practical but now seems stupidly humorous.

Regardless, while your uncannily dark blood soaked into the floorboards, Bendy found you. He laughed and laughed and laughed. “Ya really think you can escape me like that?” he’d said, as ink pumped back into your starving veins, painfully bloating them too full. He danced while you writhed in agony, scratching at your own forearms and wrists as if you could extract the ink with your fingernails.

Another time, you tried to hang yourself. The boards broke as soon as you stepped off the chair. You were humiliated into abandoning that effort.

The third time, you stood above the fathomless abyss that the Ink Machine appeared from, so so long ago when you first turned it on (god, you’d give anything to have never done that). You closed your eyes, wished Linda the life you never got to live, and stepped over the side.

You fell.

And then you were caught.

Ropes upon ropes of slimy darkness. Hot rancid smelling glee. You couldn't make sense of the world. There was no upside down, no right side up, only a void. Your eyes perpetually strained to glimpse any tiny twinkle of light, but there was nothing.

The darkness breathed. Grinned. Cradled, caressed, aroused.

You… still have waking nightmares about what happened in that pit, and it scares you that you don’t remember how you got out. The truth, you're sure, is that Bendy eventually let you out. Let you out to run again, like a mouse in the clutches of a cat. 

You don’t need more than three experiences to learn that lesson. No escape, not even in death. No matter how much you wish it. That leaves you in a deplorable situation: you can’t die, but you can’t fight him either. You’re scared to fight him. Allison and Tom tried. Part of you likes to believe they’re still alive, somewhere. That they might some day find you and that together, you can bring Bendy down.

After all – Bendy didn’t kill them. Or at least you don’t think he did. See, you know Bendy well. You know that if he were to kill Allison and Tom, he would make it… very personal to you. He would make you watch. Might make you help. He’d revel in your agony as he slowly and painstakingly ripped them apart piece by piece, raping and humiliating them all the while. That is the Bendy you know. So for him to not mention Allison and Tom after your awful liaison in front of them…

Well, you want to have hope they lived. That they are (if there is any god apart from him) safe and hiding somewhere in the studio.

You do know that if they are alive, they want nothing to do with you. It’s best they don’t. Bendy follows you like a shadow. You can feel him crawling down your spine, even when you think you are alone. The truth is you are never alone. He’s always watching, everything at once.

Everything except, perhaps, one place.

You leave the lower levels of the studio, advance back up to the ones Alice (Susie) lords over.

There is no warm blood between the two of you. She corrupted and destroyed everything that made Boris good (your one and only ally in this nightmare, now dead). She tried to kill you, too. But that’s when Bendy intervened, and you wouldn't wish what he did to her on anyone.

She crawled back to the safety of her lair, where Bendy doesn’t tread, and you found some pity for her in your heart, even after everything.

So it’s not warmth you share. Not happiness. But there is a mutual terror. Camaraderie in despair. Both of you were once human, and both of you now are something less than human. Neither of you are happy. Both of you are slowly, steadily, losing bits and pieces of your mind and soul. Diseased and wasting in this place shut away from nature and light and good. In that, you can find some commonality. You can deteriorate together.

There's something about that that draws you back to her time and time again, despite your lack of any real friendship or amiability.

You stand beneath a cartoonish Alice head. “Susie?” you try hopefully.

“I’m Alice Angel,” she snarls over the speakers.

It wasn’t worth the try. She rarely responds to Susie anymore. That name is another piece of her chipping away to dust. And the less and less she responds to it, the worse and worse you feel.

“Alice,” you correct.

“Henry," she deigns to acknowledge. "Come crawling back like a beaten dog, I see. Don’t think we don’t know what’s happened to you.” A twisted, disgusted curiosity.

You don’t know how she knows, but it doesn’t matter. “I don’t want to think about it.”

“You sure seemed to enjoy yourself.” Bitter, suspicious.

“Su- Alice – you know I don’t want anything he does to me.”

“Sure.”

“Do you know of any way to get him out of your head?” He’s quiet now, at least. His presence weaker.

“Oh no,” she replies. “He’s got his claws far, far too deep in you for that.”

“Why doesn’t he come to this floor?”

“He doesn’t believe he can,” Alice laughs, like trickling water and grating stone. It’s nearly hysterical. “Someone told him once, ‘you can’t,’ and he believed it. So now it’s true. The downside of being all-powerful, wouldn't you say? Everything he believes becomes true.” She sighs. “If only he were still so naïve….”

That’s informative, but useless. As Alice said, Bendy is not naïve any longer – you had never known a time when he was. That was before you came here.

“You shouldn't stay long,” Alice adds nonchalantly, but there’s an edge to it. “He really seems fond of you. I’d hate for him to put his beliefs to the test.”

You don't like Alice, but you also don’t want to bring more suffering to her. She hides, and copes, in one way or another on her own, as her sanity dangles by a thread. You refuse to destroy what weak protection she has earned from him. So you move on. Towards the exit. Or where the exit should be.

You stand in front of it. The door is cracked, a sliver of golden light spilling through.

It… seems so perfectly simple: just walk up to the door, open it, and step outside.

It’s not that simple. You’ve tried. A lot.

Once, you fell before reaching it.

Once, the door slammed shut and locked.

So maybe don’t try to open it, you thought another time. And you took an axe to it. You hacked and hacked at the boards until ink burst like a blister and hissed between the cracks, flooding the entire floor. So that didn’t work. Sometimes the door is fake – like a hologram, sometimes, or other times, like a screen that rolls up. Sometimes you _do_ manage to open it. In those cases, it might open to an abyss. It might open to a wall. It might open to a lower level of the studio. It never opens to the outside.

So now you simply stare at it.

You’re beginning to believe there is no outside at all.

You’re beginning to believe there was nothing before, and that there will be nothing after. You’re beginning to believe in eternity.

It feels like an eternity that you stare at the door, memorizing its every nick and crack.

When you turn back around, he’s there.

His tail and feet bob in time to music you can’t hear as he watches the cartoons play on the wall.

Part of you dies. You’d like nothing more than to run. But you know him. In fact, as much as you hate it, he has become the most familiar thing here. A ceaseless presence. If he has shown himself to you, he’s not going to let you run. He wants to play. And you will play. Because if you don’t, he will force you.

You’re becoming inured to this, you think, as your legs manage to walk towards him.

“How’s Alice doin’?” he asks, while the Bendy on screen innocently bakes cookies.

Your throat is stuck shut.

“She never wants to say hi to me,” Bendy continues, crossing his arms. “Always hidin’ down there, holed up where demons can’t go. What a bore!”

Still you say nothing.

He turns to you, his eyes black and soulless. He’s smiling. “Well, at least I’ve got you, right, Henry?”

“What do you want?”

“Chh, now c’mon, don’t be so rude. You’d think all those frequent romps under the proverbial covers would help ya feel a lil more cheery.”

So maybe that’s what he wants.

He doesn’t have to seize control before you’re undoing your pants button. There isn’t any point in resisting, and you’d rather get it over with as quickly as possible – and more importantly, without him piloting your body.

“Wow!” he laughs, sharp as glass. “Geez, Henry, you’re eager.”

“It’s what you want,” you say, unable to keep the bitterness from your tone. You stand in front of him, place your hands on his chair, and lean over him. Ready to serve your purpose. You aren’t hard, but he doesn’t care (he’ll make you be soon enough).

“Have I gotten predictable?” he says quietly. He isn’t smiling anymore.

Chilly fingers scrawl down your spine. That isn't part of the usual game. “No,” you reply quickly.

“I have.” He sits lower, brooding. “Yeesh, what a thing to lay on a guy… sayin’ my talents in the bedroom have gotten old.”

“No-“ What he does already is plenty terrifying, and change is never, never good with him.

“Nah don’t be polite just to avoid hurtin’ my feelings.” Bendy peers up. You find that you can’t move away. He’s controlling you again, puppeting you. “Communication is important in a relationship, Henry-o. If I ain’t doin’ it for you anymore, I ought’a mix things up a bit. Lesse, what can we do t'spice things up….” He taps his fingers thoughtfully.

You try to jerk away; you can’t move.

“Oh, I know!” He snaps his fingers. “If the same-o same-o has gotten boring, let’s do a switcheroo. You bottom, an’ I’ll top.”

You do not like the sound of that, but you don’t have any choice in the matter. While you’re held still as a statue, something begins to ooze up your ankles. It’s slimy, wet, and cold; it wriggles into your pant leg and climbs up and you’re so focused on it that you don’t at first realize there’s something standing behind you.

It can’t be Bendy because he’s still sitting, tail swishing, expression mischievous and entirely inhuman. But there is something - something that emanates a chill. Something that lines itself up with every inch of your back, pressed close so there's not an inch of you not touching. It's something that wraps many many  _many_ arms around you: around your throat, your chest, your stomach. Winding around your arms, your legs. Something that breathes heavy over the little hairs on the back of your neck.

Bendy reclines against his chair, his expression smug as ever. “Just relax, Henry-o. I’ll make ya feel good.”

“What is it?” you barely dare to breathe.

“It’s me, Henry. What, did ya think I couldn't be in two places at once?”

Then he looks above your head, perhaps to meet the face of whatever terrible thing has you in its clutches. “Though, he looks a liiittle different. Whole lot bigger than this form.” Bendy tilts his head to the side. “Lots more teeth. Big teeth. Lot more limbs, too.” Bendy spreads out his arms and legs demonstratively. “This form's only got four! Well, five, if ya count my tail. That form… yeesh, I can’t begin to count.”

You believe him. Its chest rises and falls pressed to your back. It's growling softly. There are many numerous things licking at your innermost thighs, down between your knees. Long wet strings of ink smear all over your skin. You're still nearly fully dressed, but it doesn't matter, because this thing can both slither up under your clothes and soak right through the fabric. There might as well be nothing between you and it. Between you and Bendy. 

You shake. The glass square eye of the projector flashes and gleams as cartoons continue to silently play.

Moist clumps of ink drool down over your hair, trickle along your jaw, drip off your chin. Whatever is behind you, it’s immense. And it's very, very eager. You can feel its need, thick as your calf, coiling impatiently over your lower back. 

“I ain’t too good at talkin’ through that form,” Bendy says nonchalantly. “So we’ll have to chat just like this.” Bendy strokes your cheek; his touch reviles you, but you can’t pull away from it.

The only noise you make is a pathetic whimper. You wish you could die. 

“You fight so hard,” Bendy remarks softly as the first tendril pushes into you. You sob, the black arm of ink violating and violent, stretching you beyond reason. Impaling you. Your legs tremble. You’re certain you would have collapsed, if not for the huge appendage twined up in your guts holding you up like a puppet.

“Maybe you should see how pleasant things could be for you,” he says.

This can't be pleasant. This can't, you think, as it starts to  _move_ and it burns like it's ripping through your soft flesh. It might be. Your body is like a limp meaty sock, jerking weakly with every thrust. 

"Here, I'll give ya a hand." Then he’s in your head again, sweet and thick like molasses. Ink swirls in your thoughts, scrubs over memories and thoughts. Blots everything unimportant out, drowns chunks of you like the runty puppies nobody needs.

Your eyes go lidded and foggy. Your body is numb and warm. Full of his ink as this manifestation of his fucks you raw, and it’s abruptly (was always) achingly pleasurable. Something you want to grind against – as soon as you think it, you’re doing it, your back sluttishly arched. Your thoughts are scattered.

You try to latch onto something – what was your name? – but everything is black. Redacted. Gone. It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters but him.

Bendy is everything. He deserves this. You deserve to have this done to you. Your hand comes forward and strokes his horns – how soft, how sharp. He lets you touch him, he allows it, because he’s merciful, benevolent, treating you rough and awful as you should be treated.

Only… Your head hurts. It’s splittingly painful, like someone has jammed a whitehot rod of iron through your skull, ear to ear, right through the soft matter of your brain. It feels like ink is flaking off from that rod, filling your cranium drip by drip and making your head impossibly heavy and swollen.

Your grin is loose. Your eyes drift in their sockets like little marbles floating in ink.

Oh. Your fingers shakily brush the corner of your eyes and you realize that ink _is_ dripping from your eye sockets.

A name floats up vaguely

Linda. Linda Linda Linda

Henry Henry you are Henry what are you doing

Your tongue lolls out. All you smell is acrid ink. It’s all you taste. It’s everything.

“-enry?”

Him. He’s speaking to you. Something wrenches and the thought is violently forced but so burningly truthful – you love him. He is everything. He is everything.

**_He is everything._ **

“Aw, shoot. Might've pushed a lil too hard there.”

You lurch and vomit up clumps of ink.

“Hold on-“

The huge object pumping in and out of you yanks out so hard you stagger. Your mind swims. You hit the ground; more ink burps from your mouth. It seeps from your tear ducts. Some of it trickles out of your ear.

“Henry? Henry!”

You laugh weakly; ink bubbles and bursts. Your hands are close to your face, scrabbling stupidly over the floor. Are you trying to escape? What are you doing? Your fingernail squelches out of its socket. You love him. He is everything.

A wrenching in your skull; you scream, scramble backwards. But ink bleeds away, leaving stained memories and - 

Henry Henry Henry 

You're Henry

No no god what did he do to you-


	4. Chapter 4

Bendy is everything

(He’s not)

He’s a demon he rules over the-  
He’s everything to you

Who are _you_?

You

You are

Bendy is everything. Worship him. Adore him.

You become aware you have a body, long enough to vomit up ink. Then you sink under again.

He’s everything. You love him. (you created him?) that makes no sense; he is, was, and always will be. Never created but

You _drew_ him.

Henry.

You’re _Henry_.

You don’t know what that means. Not at first.

You start out knowing that you’re sick. That there’s something wrong with you. You keep throwing up ink. You haven’t eaten anything in long time. Part of you thinks that isn’t normal; you should be worried. Then the thought drifts away, like driftwood sucked down in a whirlpool. Held down under thousands of pounds of swirling water. 

Bendy. Bendy. Bendy. Bendy. He's all that matters. Anything else is scattered, nonsensical.

He visits and grins and calls you Henry.

Henry. Linda. You grasp at these little pieces that you are sure should mean something to you, but they lead only to dead ends and abysses of ink. You can't remember there being anything before this hell. You can't remember being anything but a toy. Perhaps there was nothing before that. Perhaps this was you, always. 

(No).

He’s keeping you captive.

He, Bendy, the god of this world.

No.

No.

 ** _No_**.

He cuts your arm once, and watches as nothing but ink spills from your veins.

“Boy, I really fucked ya up,” he comments.

You aren’t sure what he means. But your stomach hurts. All your insides hurt, actually, and it’s such a common occurrence that you barely think about it. It feels like things are shifting around. Rearranging. Becoming… new. Different. Not like you’re supposed to be.

Blood, you think suddenly, out of the blue. _Blood_ is supposed to be in your veins. Odd that it's not. Not even one drop.  

“Henry?” He says. “Henry? Your brain in there somewhere?” He goes wiggling around in your head. You can feel him, squirming and wet like a fistful of maggots crammed right into your skull. He's looking for something that you're not sure exists. You gag. “Gettin’ real worried for ya, Henry. I liked ya how you were, see, an’ I’d rather have ya back.”

“I love you,” you mutter, and spit up ink.

His look is an odd one. “No, ya don’t. Look, I was just tryin’ to have a bit o’ fun, I didn’t mean ta mess ya up, Henry.”

“You’re everything.”

“That’s Sammy’s job,” he’s getting increasingly distressed. “Sammy’s got the whole worship thing - trust me, ya can’t do it as well as him-“

“Everything, everything,” you burble.

He leaves you again.

Time passes.

You’re behind bars. Bars on all four sides. Bars always, for an eternity. You have perhaps three square feet of space. You can’t lay down. It hurts to sit. So you stand, always. Swaying, dizzy. It occurs to you that humans aren’t made to stand for this long (days, weeks, months…. You’re scared to think you may have been here for longer). It occurs to you that you’re a human.

“You comin’ back to me?” Bendy says, another time much later, though you couldn't begin to say how much later. There’s no way to tell time here, whatsoever. No sunrise, no sunset. No sun.

That helps you realize that you know what the sun is; once, you lived under it. Once, you got to see it each day. That time is gone. You have not seen the sun for a while. Longer than he has kept you captive.

"Henry?" he looks concerned.

He leaves eventually, while your shattered mind works over the syllables he had enunciated. 

Then. 

Henry.

 _You’re_ Henry.

Henry. Henry. Henry.

Clarity hits you.

You scream.

You wish you didn't remember. You want it all gone, now that it has come back. It was better when you thought there was nothing, that you were nothing, except a mute and pointless swaying being that was never anything else. Now you remember, and remembering hurts. Remembering means other things, too. It brings back an innate human terror - the terror of being trapped, like prey caged in and surrounded by predators (or just one, in this case).

You can’t move. You are alone, stuck in a cage too small to lay down in (you haven’t even slept for-)

You lose control of your limbs, but not in the same way as when Bendy possesses you. He is nowhere near you; his presence only a light touch in your mind. What possesses you is terror, and you find you are just as helpless to it. You strike the bars. Slam into them. Scream. Claw. Try to bend them apart. By the end, you’ve got splintered fingernails (one of them is already missing, you blankly note), bruised shoulders, hands bloodied (with ink).

You’re panting, exhausted to the point of dissociation.

Sleep, however, is something you do not get. Something you’re not sure you can experience anymore. Your legs cramp, then throb, then go numb. They repeat this pattern many times. You cry from it periodically, and are too exhausted to feel ashamed. 

Time passes.

You panic. A lot. Over a wide variety of things. You panic about the lack of space. The inability to sit. You panic about being alone. You panic at the temperature of the bars, which seems like a silly thing to panic over, and you panic again when you think about that. Many times you lose control of yourself without any influence from Bendy at all (you start to wish he would influence you), and you continue to abuse and mutilate your body against the bars.

Your nails find your flesh and you scratch  
Scratch scratch 

Scratch  
Scratch scratch-scratch-scratch-scratch

The wounds are a purplish black, getting darker, darker, darker

Then ink oozes up. Then lots of ink. Spilling down your flesh. You scratch more.

What if he never returns?

(he’s not going to return).

He’s abandoned you. Nobody will ever come get you. No matter what happens to you. You will simply be stuck here, staring at dripping ink and blank walls, panicking over and over again, in an eternal purgatory. Unable to die. Completely alone. Forever.

“How ya feelin’ today, Henry?”

Then just like that, he’s there. You flinch so hard you strike the bars, but by this point your flesh feels soft and bruised all over.

“Bendy,” you gasp.

“Aw, crud, still jumbled up, huh?”

“No-“ he might leave you. “No, I-“ then you falter. Do you really want him here? (yes it’s better than nothing). You hate him. You despise him more than you have ever despised anything. He is sick, evil to the core. He wants only to bring you more misery. But- “Just - stay,” you say hoarsely. “For a few minutes.”

He tilts his head to the side. “Ya seem more sane, but… yer askin’ me to stay with ya?”

No. No that was messed up. You clutch your head (your elbow hits the bars and smarts). “I don’t know,” you say hoarsely. “Let me out, Bendy. Please let me out.”

He laughs. “But ya look so cute in there, Henry.”

You scratch, and wish you could tear out your heart if only to make things end.

Time passes.

He is the only one that visits. You start thinking perhaps nobody else exists in this world. But then he'd have no one else to play with, so others must exist… somewhere only he can reach. Somewhere where they can’t reach you. You ache for them, still. You ache to be free. Your body aches, always. Sometimes your legs collapse without your say so, and then you're crammed at the bottom of the cage, feeling more trapped than ever, and your legs never stop hurting, crumpled under you like useless sticks of throbbing inflamed meat.

“How ya feelin’?” He asks another time. You think it's another time. 

“I don’t want to be alone.” You jumble all the words because you shouldn't be saying them. That, at least, you can remember.

“You want me around?”

No. 

Yes. 

No. 

You scratch. Ink drips.

Time passes.

“Hiya, Henry.”

...

“I’ll letcha out if you fuck me.”

Your heart hammers. You had stopped believing it's possible to leave the cage. The cage is - is what you know, now. The outside world looms. But part of you, some squashed human part, aches for it. “Yes," you agree. 

He lets you out. The first thing you do with your freedom is cry. It's a pitiful sort of thing to do, but you can't stop it.

“C’mon, Henry," he urges.

You do _exactly_ as he asks. He doesn’t have to control you, not for one second, because you readily serve him. Anything to be out of the cage. Anything to be free. You've reached beyond a point of being disgusted or ashamed with yourself.

“Well that was fun,” he says when it’s all said and done. “Back in the cage, buddy.”

You fight like hell, but your body is weak and atrophied and he… he is immense and impossible to fight. You’re crammed back in like an animal and the door slams.

“Buh-bye~” he says.

It begins again.

Again.

Again.

And then something breaks the routine.

Blessedly, horribly. 

You're leaning against the bars, eyes closed, all your thoughts consumed with the pain in your legs, when you hear a voice. A voice soft, tentative, afraid. A voice so close. Most importantly, a voice that isn't his. It says one simple thing: "Henry."

Your eyes snap open.

At first, you don’t believe what you see. It’s a face you have not seen in so long that you have nearly forgotten.

“Allison,” you breathe.

"Henry. God, he’s keeping you here?”

Him. He. Bendy. The fact that you could have forgotten for even a second- Your eyes hunt for him in every corner, every doorway. “It isn’t safe here.” Then, foggily, you recollect your last meeting with her, and you shake. “H-how do you know I’m not - not with him?” Not his.

“Tom thinks you are,” she admits. “He doesn’t know I’m here. But I know how Bendy can get in someone’s head. I know he can control them.”

Allison’s eyes are far too understanding. You'd forgotten what it was, to see sympathy. Bendy is incapable of it. You nearly tremble in the face of it. “It isn’t safe here,” you iterate.

“We have to free you.” She tugs at the bars.

“I don’t think it can be opened.” The cage is made of ink. Whenever Bendy releases you from it, he melts it down to a puddle and reforms it.

“Where’s the lock?”

“It doesn’t have one-“ you don’t know how to convey this to her fast enough.

She shakes her head. “There’s gotta be a way-“

“Oooh,” Bendy croons, stepping out of the wall behind Allison. “I was wonderin’ where you were at, Alice. Don’t got your Boris with ya?”

You know exactly how this will end.

You don’t want to watch, but you aren’t given a choice.

Allison flattens her back to the bars. “Get away from me.”

“Ya both crawled _so_ deep in the studio,” Bendy continues, “to hide from me. I’m impressed, really. Still don't know where the other rat is a-hidin', but I'll find him, too. In time.”

“Run,” you hiss, but god, it’s helpless. It was a pure miracle they managed to escape Bendy the first time around, and that they had hid from him all this time. But their luck could only last for so long. You wonder if it’s selfish to be glad that Tom, at least, is not here. That it wasn’t both of them, only one. You have no hope for Allison anymore.

“Stay back!” Allison whips out a pipe and holds it protectively in front of her.

It’s going to be useless. Bendy can’t be fought. He knows the exact same thing, too. He laughs. His tail coils with pleasure. “You really think that’s gonna do anything?”

He’s approaching; Allison finally rips away from the bars and continues backing away, shaking. She knew he can control minds. You think that she likely knows some of his other powers. Knows enough about him to know he’s omnipotent here, and that any fight she pulls will be a pathetic mockery.

You admire the bravery in her eyes. The determination to go down fighting. But you know it’s useless. As much as you admire it, you dread it.

“Such a fighter,” he purrs.

You don’t try to hit the bars. Don’t try to yell at her anymore. Don’t try to escape. You know better.

“I’ll hurt you,” she threatens, slashing the pipe through the air.

He laughs. “Naw, Alice. You won't. But... I will hurt you. Oh, I'll really hurt ya.” Ink flows down his face, obscuring his eyes. The same substance bubbles over his body. He’s changing. Growing. His teeth grow, too, into huge knives on a dripping maw. He hunches over, his bulk too great for two legs - as if on cue, extra limbs push out from his body and slam into the floor. His long tail waves sinisterly as his height doubles, triples, quadruples. 

Then he lunges. Far too many legs churn. Allison tries to run.

It’s a futile attempt. He grabs her, slams her against the wall, and suddenly many many hands are groping at her; some crawling under her skirt, some tearing off her shirt, others still pinning her arms and trickling along her heaving pale stomach.

He surges upon her like an animal in heat. The thing between his legs is huge, dripping with ink, and riddled with dozens of glistening thorns. There's not any real love or passion in this, however, you know. Just the ecstasy of killing. 

She’s shrieking for her life - it's the worst thing you've ever heard, a piercing cry of terror from someone who knows they're about to be ripped into pieces. It leaps an octave when Bendy shoves that thorny appendage up under her shredded skirt. Ink splashes between her legs as she’s impaled.

Her feet leave the ground. He's - he's lifting her with the force of it gouged into her, and with every thrust her body bounces and something wetly squelches. The screaming stops. Thick clumps of ink run down her seizing thighs. Her eyes are rolled up. You pray that she can’t feel anything anymore, that he killed her quickly, and it’s just nerves twitching her body, like a trampled insect -

She spasms. An ugly bubbling noise escapes her throat. She's still breathing, christ, and she’s crying. You can’t see it, not from your position, but you feel it because Bendy opens his emotions to you, just a little, and there’s a giddy delight at her crying like a limp, leaking doll. He loves reaming her through. Loves splitting her apart. She feels so tiny in his grip. All humans are tiny and endearing in his grip. So easily broken.  _Just like you, Henry. (love you)_

Bendy keeps thrusting, though Allison's entire midsection is torn through. You think her hips are broken; you're certain she's not breathing anymore, which is the only minor relief, and what a horrible relief, but death is better than this. Still Bendy continues, while her body flops stupidly and her head bangs against the wall. 

"S-stop it," you howl, "goddamnit, stop it - she's dead!"

Bendy pauses. He genuinely hadn't realized she was dead. God, he had continued thinking she was alive that entire time-

Chortling through ink, Bendy yanks out. Her body drops and hits the ground with a noise you hope you never hear again. She doesn’t move again.

Bendy swerves his huge head towards you. For a heartbeat, you feel with such dreadful intensity his desire to do exactly that same thing to you. It only takes a heartbeat of that feeling for you to be certain of your own death. Then Bendy shuts off the connection. He shrinks to his smaller form, and dusts off his hands.

“Don’t’cha worry, Henry. I wouldn't kill ya."

You think, in hindsight, you’d rather him kill you, however grotesque and painful it is. You want things to end.

“Haha, that’s too bad, buddy. You’re gonna live _forever_ with me. You an' I, for an eternity.”

He turns, puts his hands on Allison’s mutilated corpse. With a forceful twist, he rips her arm from its socket, and begins to eat.


	5. Chapter 5

Bendy systematically eats Allison’s mangled body. He twists limbs off with crunching pops; his flat teeth tear effortlessly through her flesh. The blood is black, but she was human to you. Watching her be devoured kills you inside. She had been one of the few reasons you still had hope. Which is exactly why Bendy did this. He knew it would be one more nail hammered into your already butchered mind.

You don't even entertain the hope you once would have: that Allison will come back. Because yes, death here is impermanent. Everything serves Bendy’s whims, and if he wants something alive, it will again live. The ink itself, too, favors suffering over death, and anything that dies tends to return, whether it wants to or not.

But there are some instances where things do not come back. Where the heart is destroyed, and Bendy does not will a new one to be formed.

You suspect he will not allow Allison back.

When there is nothing left but spatters of ink, he turns to you, inquiring, and pries in your head.

Whatever he’s looking for, he doesn’t find, and he leaves looking unhappier.

Allison’s death, you find, is something so shocking and real and horrible that the immanency of it keeps you from sinking under into [ _worship, I love him, I want him-_ ]

It’s a sick kind of relief to find.

You hate what was done to her and wish you could have done anything, anything at all, to prevent it. Helplessness is something you're becoming familiar with, however. 

So occasionally you cry, though mostly you feel hollow and lost, incapable of any expression of agony.

Over time, little bits and pieces of who you are return. You remember little fragments of yourself, which you cling to fiercely, terrified that Bendy will come along and wipe them all out again. Perhaps this time, make them irretrievable.

Then again, he had been upset about the change, too. He won’t be keen to repeat the effort, you know that. But you also know that he makes mistakes. He gets excited, and goes too far. And he has a great deal of trouble reining in his impulses or learning from his mistakes. In that way, he reminds you of an old friend… you can’t remember the name...

[Hate burns hot. You aren’t sure why].

Knowing that your piecemeal self-awareness may be an ephemeral thing, you clutch it all the more determinedly. You won't let him take this from you (you won't have any choice if he decides to).

The next time Bendy returns, he's delighted to search your brain to find it mostly horror-terror-pain rather than worship-adoration.

“Almost back to your old self!” He declares happily, which is when you know you're in trouble.

“You can betcha I won’t be crammin’ ya full of ink again any time soon. If I knew that was gonna happen -“ Bendy whistled and shook his head. “Boy, would I have done something else instead.”

You say nothing.

“But, now you're back. Right, Henry?”

It’s a little foggy. But you mostly have yourself together.

“Great. Ya seem a lot better on the inside.”

You assume he means your mind, because your body is not human anymore. It looks as if it is, but you have plenty of doubts. Something has been wriggling in your veins and muscles. Something writhing in your brain matter. It laps the backs of your eyeballs like the slimy tail of some worm-like parasite.

“Great.” Bendy says. “Wanna play hide and seek?”

No answer.

Bendy snaps his fingers. “Dancing. Let’s dance.”

He melts the cage. As soon as he grabs you, the scenery changes. A new, dull yellow lit room, but this one wide and sweeping. A ballroom. A chandelier perpetually sways nauseatingly overhead. You don’t know how it doesn’t fall, but for a few moments you stare at it, dizzy and hypnotized by its rocking.

On his will, scratchy music swells from invisible speakers. His tail twitches, his foot taps.

He ate Allison, you think randomly. He raped her to death and ate her corpse. This tiny, grinning demon. There's hardly any surprise because you know what he can do but -

An absurd smile twitches at your lips. A fragment of a memory floats in - sitting hunched over your desk, before the studio became so cartoonishly unreal, and doodling the first little sketches of Bendy. It had brought a smile to your face. You had thought,  _I hope people love him._ Like a tiny tattered fox pup that you bring home and hope your parents see its appeal enough to let you keep it. 

This... thing... in front of you... it isn't what you wanted. You couldn't have known this would be the result. 

Bendy lets out a gleeful yip and springs into a dance, as if summoned by the music.

He grabs your hand; you join the dance. The two of you must look ridiculous, him being half your height, and your limbs flailing and swinging and jiving with the music. 

Creation and creator, you think. Cartoon and cartoonist. It's something out of fiction. A silly thought occurs to you - that none of this was ever real. It's a dizzy, disorienting thought. You wonder if people wonder this normally.

If they ever look at the walls around them, the objects arrayed about them that have made up their life, and think...

it's 

all

just

_imaginary_

And who is to say it's not?

On some level, it's a welcome bliss you sink into. You don't want things to be real. You don't want this kind of suffering to actually exist in the world. So you dance, and part of you even gets _into_ it, so long as you don't think too much. You don't have to think. Your mind drifts far, far away. Time passes. Song after song plays. He never tires. But you don’t truly mind, either (you love him - no, you don’t - no, just - don’t think about anything).

You don’t.

You’re numb.

You're nothing. 

You might not even be real.

Bendy stops so suddenly you don’t notice at first.

His expression is sour. “What’s wrong with ya, Henry? I thought you were better.”

It’s always black and white for him. No matter how many minds he reads, he won’t ever get that.

The sourness turns to rage. “I can too.”

You say nothing.

The music stops. His fists are clenched; part of you knows you should be scared, but what more can he do to you? He’s raped you, flayed you alive, made you think and feel things you never wanted to think or feel. He’s made you forget yourself (and you still haven’t entirely remembered), and he’s killed someone who meant so much to you.

"I don't know if I'm real," you finally say. 

"'Course ya are," he replies, affronted. "You made me, Henry."

"Are you real?" 

He stares. 

You suppose nobody has asked him that before. When you're slaughtering people, they don't usually have to ask if you're real. But if the people he was killing weren't; if it's all part of a story-

" _Stop_ ," Bendy says. His eyes are big ovals. He tangles his hands in front of his body and takes a step back. 

"You're a cartoon-"

"Brought to life," Bendy adds.

He sees the doubt, not in your expressionless face, but in your mind. 

"Brought to real life," Bendy emphasizes again, as if this time you'll have a different response. "You did that, Henry."

You say nothing. 

"Henry!" he snarls. "I'm just as real as you!"

You wonder how real that actually is.

A distorted shriek wracks the room. The wooden walls shred like paper; paintings crash; the chandelier swings. Ink bleeds from every surface. Some drips down on your head from above.

"Say it," Bendy snaps. 

When you don't, he takes control over your body, and your mouth moves; you speak, "You're real. This isn't a story. All of this is real."

He inches out of your mind. His look is flat, unsatisfied. No amount of  _forcing_ you will give him what he wants, not here. 

By the contained rage (and fear?) on his face, he knows that.

In a heartbeat, the both of you are gone from the decaying ballroom. Back to the room with your cage. He throws you in; the bars reform from ink.

“I toldja to get better, Henry,” he snaps.

You’re alone again.

….

….

…..

…..

 

That had really bothered him.

Few things get him upset, and fear on him is so rare that you almost didn't recognize it, but as your mind drifts back, you become more certain. The thought makes your heart pound. He's spend so long making you afraid. So long tormenting you. And now... now you have your own weapon. 

For a time, you get excited about this. Anticipatory. You begin to plan what you'll say when he returns; what words you'll use to further instigate him. If he should kill you - then so what? It's not like he hasn't already done so so many times before. At the very least, you can get a few hits in yourself. 

So you sway in your cage, sometimes smiling faintly, sometimes grimly, sometimes you squeeze the bars, and all along you plan. But time keeps ticking on, forwards or backwards or sideways.  He doesn't come. He doesn't come. He doesn't come. You get tired of going over what you're going to say. You just... get tired. Sometimes, distantly, you hear screaming. Sometimes laughing. Bendy is finding ways to entertain himself without you. But he's always come back to you. No matter how much you despised it, the demon had an especial fondness for you. An intense obsession that had always terrified you - but that now you are counting on. And yet still he doesn't return. 

....

....

Your mind drifts. Sometimes you snap back, and the fervor of  _I'll fight him_ returns, but then more time and more time and more time - you lean against the bars while your thoughts swim pointlessly in circles. Your legs ache, but not as much as they should if you were still wholly human  ~~if you were real~~

Then suddenly, there's an odd sensation. In fact, the sensation had been going on for a while, you realize, but you had hardly noticed because you had been so so far away. 

You mentally shake yourself awake. You’re still leaning against the bars, still confined and caged, but….

Oh. You realize where the strange sensation is coming from, and you're not sure how to react.

You're _stuck._  To the bars.

Your flesh is literally fused to the bars of your cage. On a normal human, it might look as though the poles were impaling your shoulder and your upper arm. On you, it… looks more like your skin is grafting _into_ the bars.

Sluggishly, you understand. The bars are formed from ink. And after what Bendy did, you yourself might be more of an ink creature than a human.

This is so outside of the normal patterns of the life you’re used to that for a long time you don’t know how to react at all. Your brain can’t comprehend it. Or the implications.

… Not at first.

Then, it dawns on you. The bars are _malleable_.

You can feel them, in exactly the same way you feel your own arms or fingers. When you try to twitch one, it’s different than flexing a muscle, but not _entirely_ different, and the surface ripples. It’s a clenched muscle that you can relax. Focusing hard, your will begins to melt it down. It’s a disturbing experience, like your flesh melting off, but it’s working.

Before long, you are stepping out of the cage; the remnant fragments of the ruined bars drip away into nothing.

You’re free.

You’re free, and Bendy isn’t around.

The implications of what you have just done (what you are now) are too frightening to consider. There’s no question, no hesitation. You want gone. Away from here. Most importantly, away from Bendy.

You know of one place that Bendy won’t ever go. So you _run_. Any second hell itself should show up at your heels and drag you back; every second you expect it to. But he is either distracted by something else, or amused by your escape, because he doesn’t interfere.

You reach your destination and collapse.

“Oh look,” Alice drawls over the speakers. “The dog comes crawling back again.”


	6. Chapter 6

No matter where you go, where you run, you can’t escape the feeling of him on your skin. _Under_ your skin. He consumes. And it doesn’t matter how far you are from him - he will always be in you now. There’s something ink-drenched writhing under your ribs.

You're afraid that as time passes, less and less of you is human. The way you escaped the cage is proof of that. On some level, maybe that’s a reprieve. Humans starve down here: not from food, no - the bacon soup makes sure of that - but they starve of light, sun, happiness. Nobody’s humanity can survive. So perhaps being not-human would help you to not suffer.

But you know better. The swaying, large-eyed creatures that haunt this realm are not happy. Their very existence is suffering, worse even than a human’s. They have lost everything they once were. Most don’t have names. Most remember nothing else but ink and darkness and pain. Some buy into the twisted religion Sammy started, but most know better, and know there’s nothing for them. Just existence, as one long eternity of agony.

So as to not become one of them, you clung desperately to your humanity, and your identity. That… that is now falling apart, like a picture soaked in water, whose colors and shapes are melting together and fading into illegibility. You don’t want to lose what little of yourself is left. You don’t know if you have a choice.

“Henry,” the speakers crackle, chastising. “I hope you aren’t planning on hanging around.”

You shake your head. Then, realizing she can’t possibly see that, you speak, “no. Just a few minutes.” Any time away from him. Any time at all.

Derisive, “he’s going to get you sooner or later, Henry.”

He would. You know he would. But - _I’m just as real as you!_ Maybe he…

“Just give up and go back to him,” Susie pries.

“I can’t.” You really, really can’t. You can’t face him. “He killed Allison,” you add mutely.

The noise Susie makes is animalistic. “Good riddance.”

“Don’t.”

“I’m the only true Alice Angel. _Her_ voice never made it into an episode, you know. None of the ones that got released.” Susie’s words become wistful, single-toned, and soft. “It was always mine that people would hear…”

Into an episode. Episodes. This was a cartoon, once, not real life. “How do you remember so much?” You ask. You hadn’t remembered anything about a second Alice… You remember Susie, though, and yourself well enough. _This is important_ , something whispers in your skull. It’s hard to parse out whether that voice is yours or his.

The dual tone returns, frightening and cruel, “I knew to stay away from him… I knew that creation was-“ She cuts off sharply. Calmer, “I built my palace down here. And you, Henry, you are putting all of us in danger. Return to your master before I make you.”

You’re convinced that if she truly wants you gone, it’s no effort at all to drag you away back to his territory and leave you like carrion. It seems no matter where you go, you have no power. Still you try, “Alice, you said someone once told him he couldn't come here…”

“I was that someone, obviously,” Susie says cooly.

“If he… believed that he didn’t exist… then would he?”

Silence.

Then, “get away from here, Henry.”

You assume that command will come with some effort on her part to ensure you leave her territory. It doesn’t, though.

She’s left you to your misery. Time oozes past; you have no gauge of how much. Time means so little nowadays. But you do think it’s been quite a while before you, ponderously, say, “you told me about heaven once. You wanted to reach it. But didn’t think you ever would.”

She doesn’t answer. It hurts, to think of her hoping and hoping. Evil and twisted or not, she wanted freedom just like you.

You doze, laying on the stairs, trying to find a reason to even sit up. It’s pathetic, but you are so far beyond caring. After everything that’s been done… what does it matter? Your mind turns over your last meeting with Bendy.

_I’m just as real as you._

“You’re still on my doorstep,” the speakers crackle.

“Don’t make me leave.” It’s a plea.

“Henry,” she says shortly, clipped, and you sense it’s about to be followed by a fiercer command - one she might be inclined to act on.

“I scared him,” you interject, finding the energy to lift your head.

“What?”

“We were dancing, and… I thought I wasn’t real.” You’re still not sure.

“Get to the point.”

“He thought maybe he wasn’t, either. It scared him.”

Another long silence. Susie has been down here so long, you think, that perhaps she doesn’t believe in happy endings, either. She doesn’t believe Bendy can be stopped. She doesn’t believe in anything except hiding and killing. This world is absorbing like that. You become part of it, or you die.

“What would happen if he really believed he didn’t exist?” You ask again.

Silence. Long enough that you think she’s left, then the speakers crackle back to life, “I don’t know.” It’s a ponderous sort of statement. A scared one. She’s scared to hope.

“What if he doesn’t exist?” You try.

She laughs. It’s too high-pitched and harsh to be genuine. “He’s been playing with you too long, Henry. You’ve lost your mind.” But the words lack her usual acerbity. She’s curious, too.

It’s sometime later that she speaks again, clipped and tense, “He wants in.”

“What?” You jerk your head up and look towards the elevator, but you see nothing. No Bendy.

“You think I’d only have one exit to my lair?” She sneers. “So I could be cornered like a rat like you?”

“Is he able to get in?”

Tense silence. “He doesn’t think so.”

So yes, but he doesn’t believe he can.

“Then…” Leave him? Let him be stuck?

“I don’t like that demon so close,” Every tone in Susie’s voice bleeds fear. “Henry, leave my territory. Go back to your master.”

“He isn’t-“

“I could care less what happens to your Boris, but I doubt you want harm to befall him.”

 _What_? What did this have to do with-

“Or is he called Tom?” Susie croons viciously. “Either way, Bendy’s got him. Says he’ll kill him if you don’t turn up, Henry.”

Oh. Your body unsticks from the floor. “Where-“

With a screeching groan of metal, the door rattles open. You stumble in thoughtlessly, blindly. She emerges from the darkness, as dangerous as ever. Instinctively you tense. Like Bendy, she is a predator in this world. She’s become hard, and cruel. Though she fears him, all else fear her. It’s one thing to hear her voice; another to meet her again.

“I’m here to take you back to him,” she tells you frigidly. “I’d hate to see how he’d feel if I’d kill you, Henry.” It tries to come off as indifferent, but you know she’s remembering -

something.

Vaguely you recall her out-of-character. Not smooth nor collected, but screaming, thrashing like a fox seized in a sharp-toothed trap.

She had tried to kill you; Bendy stopped her. You’d forgotten.

She isn’t trying now. She guides you through a labyrinth of hissing pipes and pumping machinery. She walks to your left, deliberately keeping her “bad” side turned away from you. As you pass a corridor, you glimpse small paintings hung on the wall, and little trinkets collected on drawers. Trying to make a home in hell.

The thought oddly hurts.

She brings you to another exit, ushers your way forward and then steps back into the shadows. She doesn’t want to face him.

As you step out into a large room, you find that Susie was right.

Tom is kneeling at Bendy’s side - in another situation, it would be comical that even kneeling, he’s taller than Bendy. But ink is wound around his body, and knotted in his body. He had never been capable of speaking, not through all the time you knew him. Not even his expression is capable of changing much. That makes it more horrible, seeing his face painted in the permanent expression that it was made into.

“Henry!” He declares, spreading out his arms like he’s starting a show. “Great t’see ya, Henry-o. Ready to get outta the angel’s domain? I mean, c’mon, what’s she got that I don’t! That Alice - she ain’t no good! Didn’t she maim your little Boris? Well - now I got a new one. Found him huntin’ around on the lower levels. I guess when his Alice didn’t come back, he came a-sniffing!” Bendy slapped Tom’s shoulder good-naturedly; Tom flinched and you swore you heard a small growl.

Perhaps it’s all the death and killing that you're accustomed to that makes it so you hardly react (yes, something hurts - it all hurts, but only deep deep down and you ease it over with numbness).

Bendy frowns. “C’mon, Henry, I thought you were the hero-type! Ain’t he your friend?”

Tom looks at you fast. He thinks you’re a traitor - that you're on Bendy’s side. Maybe you are, you let yourself believe. Or maybe you’re neither. Maybe you’re nothing. Not real.

You don’t reply at any rate, and Bendy tilts his head to the side. (Just as predicted) you feel the slimy sensation of him burrowing up into your skull. Seeking answers when you fail to verbally provide them.

Maybe you’re nothing. Maybe he’s nothing. Maybe Tom isn’t real. Why would you bother saving him? It’s all a story -  
(It’s easy to believe, very easy. You don’t want to be real). And truly… it doesn’t feel real. You don’t remember real very well - don’t remember much of your life before, but you remember little pieces. You remember solid walls built of wood, not of ink. You remember people - real people, human people, flesh and blood. Not characters.

You remember -

The name evades you. You lurch after it.

Joey.

Yes, Joey Drew.

Joey Drew and all his dreams. All his impulses. Leaping from one story to another story, every one incomplete, unfinished, a masterpiece cut short before it could bloom (because if it was finished we’d all find out it wasn’t a masterpiece at all). A man terrified of endings.

“The Ink Machine,” he’d boomed once, manic as ever, pulling everyone along in his passions and making them do all the work. “Reality and fiction coming together! We can toss in Bendy, Alice, the whole crew, Henry, wouldn't it be great?”

Then - then -

Bendy yanks out of your head. His eyes give away nothing, but his tail is curling and uncurling, his fists tight. “What was that?”

“When we made the story of the Ink Machine,” you say slowly. Your dizziness is heightening. Your body feels half-numb, half-fake. Not yours. Not real. You look at Bendy, and he - he’s a cartoon, he can’t do anything -

His teeth show, sharper than you'd ever drawn them. Ink drips from his finger tips; claws form from them. He slashes them across Thomas’ face, puncturing straight through an eye, and it oozes black goo.

“Aren’t you gonna save him?” Bendy snaps, “Henry, don’t ya even care about your friend!”

“He’s not real.”

Bendy’s shaking. He slashes his claws across Tom again - finally, you discover that Tom is capable of some expressions: capable of showing pain, in the twisting of his face, and shutting his eyes, and hunching over. Even a whimper emerges from his throat.

Bendy laughs, but it sounds like Susie’s - warped and humorless. “Seriously, Henry! Don’tcha like the guy! Boy, you really are the traitor he thinks ya are!”

You don’t move. Ink is beginning to bleed from the walls. The corners of the room are peeling like paper, like the pages of a story, burning up like singed sketches.

When hurting Tom does nothing, Bendy abandons him to dive after you - but he’s stopped by some invisible barrier. Stopped by the line that divides Susie’s territory from his. 

“Stop it, Henry!”

Susie steps out from behind you. It’s the ruined side of her face that’s nearest, but you still recognize her look of understanding. She turns her attention silently to Bendy ; the demon latches his regard onto her so intently that you know he’s trying to read her mind, too. Whatever he finds leaves him only more panicked, as he backs away, kneading his hands like you had seem him do previously.

For a moment, you feel the faintest flicker of pity, because he looks pitiful, childishly pathetic and helpless. But that feeling doesn’t linger long - you know what he’s done.

Susie says softly, “So all this is a story,” and she says it in a way that sits oddly with you, like she thinks she’s part of it, even though she’s human (was once human). She was here before. Before everything just became part of a story.

Bendy howls, scratching at his own face with his fingers. “Stop it, you’re wrong! I’m real! You’re real! I hurt you! And - and she hurt your Boris! Didn’t that mean anything?” As he gets more desperate, rambles off more things, the studio falls apart. Pieces ripping into nothing. A void showing through the cracks.

It occurs to you that you're going to be ripped away, too. That you're going to become truly nothing, if ever you were something. This is how you die.

And that…

That you can accept.

“I hate you, Henry Stein,” Bendy snarls, his accent nearly gone.

Stein. You'd forgotten.

Then -

Then -

Then you’re not in the studio.

Susie is gone.

A clock ticks somewhere. The walls are red.

There’s a man older than any of your memories of him, but you can’t mistake those blue blue eyes.

“Ah,” he says. “You made it out again.”

Joey, you think. Joey Drew.


	7. Chapter 7

Joey, you think. Joey Drew. 

As soon as you think it, fury tears through your apathy. You don’t know why you hate him, but oh, you do. You hate him very much. 

He gives you a wide smile that reminds you of Bendy. But he doesn’t scare you like Bendy does. Joey is not small, lithe, dangerous; not inhumanely malevolent; not made of ink and nightmares. Instead, he’s decades older than you; hunched over a desk with a pen poised in his hand. Only a simple robe around a frame wasted away by age and an insufficient diet. He can do _nothing_ to you. 

Your tongue shifts behind your teeth. Real, you think. You touch your shirt. The warmth of your chest bleeds through the fabric. Real. 

“You must be very confused,” Joey says. He’s got the sort of voice that you think is supposed to be soothing. It isn’t. “Let’s see - this time, it’s because you’re not sure you’re real, isn’t it?”

How does he know that? _This time?_

“I am real,” you say firmly, if only to undermine him.

“Of course,” he replies. “I’m delighted you’re here. And what do you remember, Henry?”

Your mind works sluggishly through the question. You remember the things Bendy did to you, but you don’t think that’s what he’s asking about. You remember… Susie. Susie before she was Alice. You remember the name Henry Stein, and that it’s yours. You remember something about Joey, something about the Ink Machine…

“Wonderful,” Joey says, although you have said nothing. “Wonderful, Henry. It will all come back in time. You want to remember, don’t you.”

You do. Remembering is frightening, but you do want to. 

“Great. Just great,” Joey continues. He stands, slowly and creakily like an old tree. One gnarled hands grips your arm. “I can help you remember, Henry. I’ve always had your back, you remember that?”  


You don’t really. He begins to guide you to the kitchen. You follow. 

“This way, Henry. A little light and fresh air, that will help you.”

Light and fresh air. You hardly remember those things, so long in the dark and foul ink-thick air. His hand settles on your back as he guides you to the door. “Come on, Henry. This way.”

You turn the knob. The lock clicks open. 

Something…. 

Is wrong.

You stop before the door can open an inch.

“Henry?” Joey prompts. He pushes lightly on your lower back, encouraging. Your hand clenches in the doorframe. 

_Something is wrong._

“Just through the door, old friend. We’ll help get all your memories back.”

No.

You remember a man with the likeness of Joey, only much younger, heavy purplish bags under his eyes, a manic desperate smile on his face, “Come, Henry, you can’t tell anyone, it was an honest mistake… I didn’t know she would die, now, if I did, I never would have-“

“Henry?” He yet again inquires, in the present time.

Then the younger iteration, heaving on the chains suspending the Ink Machine. “I had to do it, Henry. This is how progress is made! If we were not doing it - someone else would.”

His knuckles dig into the meat of your back. “Through the door, _now_ ,” Joey says tightly. 

Then his office, cleaner, less stained, and his face scrunched up and red with fury, “you’re a part of this, Henry Stein! There’s blood on your hands! You think the law would take your side?”

Joey shoves; you grab the frame with both hands. He is old, and weak. You are young, and you have spent countless years battling for life in the studio. You resist.

“What did you do?” You whisper.

“What do you mean, Henry, just walk through-“

You rip away from his touch. He looks alarmed, like the very last thing he expected was for you to do that.

“You killed people-“

A nervous smile flits at the corners of his lips. “Now, Henry-“

You jerk away, and your lower back strikes the counter top.“ _What did you do?”_

His smile becomes forced. “Nothing at all. This is for your own good, Henry. To help you bring back those memories!”

You scoot closer to the living room, on edge like you are back in the studio, like things aren’t matching up right and you're in danger, you're not safe. You can’t shake the feeling. “I’m not going through that door.”

“Be reasonable,” he coos. “It’s just the outside, Henry. What could possibly happen?”

You stumble back. “You - you made all this-“

“Ah, easy, Henry-“

“It’s _your_ fault-“ You don’t know what to do - all you know is you shouldn’t go through that door. You backpedal, while Joey reaches pointlessly after you. Pivoting around, you stumble into the living room. 

Dizzingly familiar pictures on the walls, pictures you have seen marching on the walls of the studio. The world spins. You've done this before. You've been here before. (You’ve always been here). 

“Henry,” Joey calls, unevenly stepping after you. “Where are you going, Henry?”

You slam open the front door and then you’re in the blazoning sunlight, bright enough to blind you. You nearly fall down the stairs, but one way or another make it to the sidewalk. Joey’s voice warbles out behind you. He’s not calling for you anymore; he sounds amused, but you can’t pick up the words. You just want to be away from him. 

One step at a time, your feet drag over cobblestones. You squint through the brilliant sun’s haze, and only vague shapes emerge to you, shapes so familiar it makes your bones ache. Outlines of buildings painted in a bizarre sepia, the hunched shiny exteriors of motor vehicles, shadows that indicated streets you would have once walked down to get home.

You had to have been in the studio for countless years - it had felt like an eternity - and yet now that you are out, everything is achingly familiar. The stench of petrol, blending oddly with sweet smell of the bakery shop just around the corner. The clip-clop of hooves on cobblestones intermingled with the angry honking of horns, rattling of wheels, shouting of pedestrians. These noises and smells inundate you. They meld and blend and warp and distort. But they are the city. Your city. The world as you knew it before the studio. You could nearly cry in relief. 

“Help,” you gasp out. Your feeble word is drowned in the hubbub. “Someone, please,” you beg. You blindly stagger toward voices, but as soon as you think you’ve come closer to them, they fade away, and then they’re behind you, or to the side, or the other side. “Please-“

You need to see clearly. You squint, try to focus. But even buildings close to you are greyed-out, either lacking details entirely or their details come in spotty, uneven patches. Distinctly you see the curve of one arched doorway you passed a billion times on the way to work; a doorway with iron gates that you had always admired as being particularly ornate. But the rest of the building facade is muted, fuzzy. Only uneven darkened squares indicate something like windows. 

“Help,” you say weakly. The longer you look at the doorway, the more you realize even its ornate intricacies are only approximated. You reach out to touch it. It feels like wood, though it’s metal. Metal is cold, you think. And smooth. Just as you think it, it becomes so. 

A knot tightens in your stomach. You step away from the door. “Help,” you say, dread creeping upon you. “Someone, somebody, please.”

Voices continue to buzz, sometimes far far away, and sometimes right next to your ear. None of them speak words you can make sense of. It’s English, you know it is, but it’s like the harder you try to listen to any one conversation, the further away and more muted the voices are. 

“Please help,” you whisper. “Anyone. _Anyone.”_

Nobody comes.

Home. You want to go home. Instinctively you turn into an alley. The route you have done so many times before. Your legs know the way, even when your eyes and ears betray you. But the further you walk, the more distorted the buzzing becomes. Sights devolve into little more than reddish-brown shadows. Approximations of buildings. The _idea_ of a streetcar. Blurs that resemble human shapes without being human at all. They move around you like a tide. Your heart thumps faster and faster, until even its noise drowns out the continuous murmuring of meaningless voices.  

You want to go home. You want - 

The sky above, a blistering white expanse, begins to deepen into dark sepia hues. You smell chemicals. The molasses-thick stench of ink. You hear a distant dripping, drip drip drip

No, _no_   


You want to go home

You want to go home

Your feet step faster, into a jog, a run. Left here. Right. Another left. But ink is leeching into the world. Oozing down buildings that are beginning to all look like wood. Vomiting up from the cracks in the pavement. Your feet strike puddles. The sky continues to darken, darken, darken. 

Hopelessness grips you. 

Your legs come to a fumbling stop. You’re shaking as the world bleeds away, replaced by a small, confined room. Ink-soaked wooden planks. The thumping of the machine. 

“Huh,” Bendy says. 

You sob. 

He’s in front of you, turning his hand one way and another as if to inspect it’s truly there. “What a ride!”

“Why am I back here?” You ask in despair. 

“Honestly, creator, I don’t think ya ever left!” 

You were afraid of that. Helplessness consumes you. You don't try to run, or fight. It doesn't matter. It never mattered. It was hopeless from the very start.

“Ya sure convinced me that I wasn’t real. So much that I guess I wasn’t anymore! Put ya in a world with your buddy Joey, ‘an all the stuff ya remember outside of the studio. But then, hoo-boy. Suddenly I was s’pposed to create things left and right from yer memory, an’ I realized, ‘this is hard!’” Bendy laughs. “Funny thing t’realize when I didn’t think I was even alive. But, boom, ‘this is hard!’. I figured, hey, if I can think somethin’ is hard, then I gotta be a thinkin’ sort of creature to begin with. Gotta be alive, yanno? So here I am again.”

Bendy drops his hand and grins at you in a way that makes your blood run cold. You despise him, but you’re beginning to grasp that you will never escape him. 

“None of it was real,” you say. Of course not. You're not allowed any fraction of peace. This nightmare never ends.

“Nope. Not real like y’thought. Just somethin’ I made for ya, kinda on accident. Soon as I realized, I yanked ya right back here. Now I know _I’m_ real, and none ‘a that is.” His expression changes. He takes a step nearer. “Hey, Henry… is that really what it’s like, outside the studio?”

You reply, “No.” Not truly. That was a re-construction from fragmented, ink-ruined memories. Nothing like the true thing. 

“That’s too bad.” Bendy looks away. “I would’a liked to see the world, yanno? I mean, I like it here, really. But…” 

It sickens you that he, in some capacity, relates to you. That he’s trapped here, too. 

“You’ll have t’tell me about it sometime,” Bendy concludes softly. “‘Bout all the world.”

“I don’t want to tell you anything.” You turn around to walk away, as if that's going to do anything. 

He appears in front of you. “Nah-ah Henry.” His expression is a simper that fills you with nothing but dread. “You don’t wanna leave your creation all alone, do ya? All right, I know I said some mean things t’ya back there, but only ‘cause you were thinkin’ mean things yourself, all that about me not bein’ real.”

You turn around again. He’s in front of you again. There’s several of him, now, all around you. 

“But I forgive ya,” one says. 

“After all, if ya taught me anything,” another chimes in. 

“It’s that people make mistakes. And you gotta forgive them.”

“Forgive an’ forget.”

“And I do love you a lot, creator,” the one directly in front of him says. 

“Why are you like this?” You ask. It’s all hopeless anyway. You expect your question to be futile, but you can’t help but ask it. The character you had created was nothing like this. You would never want something like this to exist. You have grown to hate him, and yourself, and everything associated with the job you had once loved. 

“You made me like this,” he replies - all of the many Bendy’s, all at once. 

You don’t dare disagree. His black eyes glitter. “Now that all that nonsense is over,” he says, “wanna have some fun, Henry?”

“Maybe you could escape,” you say.

The copies of him melt down into nothing but ink puddles. The one directly in front of you tilts his head to the side. You’re grasping at straws, but for a brief brief moment there you had seen something humanizing in this monster. You had seen longing, and a desire for freedom, and something that might have hinted at loneliness. Most likely it was nothing. Monsters chafe at being behind bars just as much as humans do. Not to mention the havoc Bendy could wreak should he be released upon the world. You hesitate, unsure about sharing your idea now. But Bendy’s grin grows. 

“You want us t’work together. Creator and creation, fightin’ side by side to escape!”

“I’m not helping you,” you retort, defeated. A new idea has occurred to you. That Bendy is the one meant to be trapped here, and whatever mechanism that seals him in has sealed you in also. You are a casualty. Your confinement is a necessary evil, in someone else’s eyes. Dooming a few humans for the purpose of saving all the others. Given what you know about Bendy, you agree.

Bendy laughs. “Are there that many humans outside the studio? Sounds like a blast.”

“Whether we’re working together or not, we can’t escape.” In all Bendy’s omnipotence, he has never managed to leave the studio, and you doubt it’s for a lack of trying. “You know that,” you add.

His expression is surly (he’s convincible). “Gotta be all boring and practical,” he gripes (but he believes you; he isn’t infallible). 

“Just you and me,” you say, hating what that means.  

His tail flicks to one side, then the other.“Come t’think of it, this whole “thinking I didn’t exist” thing really took it outta me. I could use somethin’ to lift my spirits, Henry-o.”

For one final time, you wonder if you and Bendy could escape, working together. Then you accept it’s best you don’t. This is future. There will never be anything else. “I guess it doesn’t matter if I say no,” you reply. 

“I can make ya say yes.” His cold, inhuman hand slips into yours. He smiles up at you like an eager child. “Before we get to the hurtin,’ teach me how to draw, Henry. I wanna learn.”


End file.
